The early summer, which the Sámi call ”spring-summer”, is a busy period for craftspeople. It is time-consuming and hard to turn the reindeer hides into beautiful, brown reindeerskins. To achieve this, the craftspeople need to get the hair off, to bark and to soften the hides. For dyeing with bark they need to peel a great amount of bark off willows and birches. This is not so tough in early summer when the bark comes off easily. This is also the time to gather birch and pine roots to be used as materials for handicraft. People know that the period has begun by the fact that the Labrador tea is in bloom.
The nightless night, or the continuous summer day, is the special characteristic of the Arctic: the sun does not set at all at night. As the sunrays reach the ground at a small angle, the light is soft and temperatures quite cool. A cold spell– a short cold period when it may even snow – is a normal phenomenon at the beginning of the summer. Flowers freeze easily, and the cold weather may spoil the whole cloudberry or blueberry crop of the summer. The gourmet delicacy of the forest, the false morel, yields its crop in June.